So this is love.
A painful motherfucker.
That old saying, If you love somebody, let them go, actually had real-life applications and it was galling and horrible, to say the least. But Jesus, what he’d said was the truth. She fit into that bar full of millionaires tonight like sugar in coffee. A much-needed dose of sweet among the bitterness. Gorgeous and ready to take on the world—it was right there on her face.
He’d felt like a jackass walking in there, stuffed into his suit. Palms sweating.
The truth of why he’d come wouldn’t stay out of his mouth. Hell, telling Natalie how he felt about her was becoming this thing he needed to do to breathe. But taking her to bed knowing she would come back to this city one day soon and stay? Might as well perform open heart surgery on him without the painkillers.
Those fancy hotel elevators would take them upstairs. To a room with a really nice bed and, yeah, that business formal dress she was wearing would come off so easily. Just slide right down to the floor. He’d get on his knees and eat her out until her head spun. She wouldn’t be nearly as polished when he finished with her.
“August, about what you said . . . ” she began, then paused to arch an eyebrow. “I can tell what you’re thinking about.”
August sighed, resisting the urge to adjust his erection. “I doubt that.”
She blinked innocently. “You’re not thinking of going down on me?”
Now it was August’s turn to blink. And he did. About ninety-six times. “Did you not hear a word I said before? About protecting myself?”
“Yes, I did.” She took a long breath. “I heard you and I understand. You’re right. The more time we spend in bed together, the more difficult it would be to part ways.”
That sounded like a pretty damn good reason to go upstairs, now didn’t it?
August gnashed his molars together and tried to smile at the same time.
Everything hurt. His heart, brain, and dick were a trifecta of misery.
“I’ll wait here while you go upstairs.” He shoved both hands in his pockets to keep from reaching for her. “Call me when you’re inside the room with the door locked. And a chair wedged under the door, too, princess. You wouldn’t believe how easy it is to disengage those little safety latches.”
“August—”
“Please, Natalie, you have to go. I’m losing my resolve. You have no idea how bad I need you right now.”
Because, God, she was beautiful. The whole lobby had to be staring at his wife. If he could tear his eyes off her for a second, he might be able to confirm. He’d have flown back and forth between coasts for the rest of his life, just to be standing there to hear her voice. He also knew a long-distance relationship between them would never work, because he’d resent every second away from her and he still had a responsibility to Sam. And now to his CO.
The reminder of his commanding officer forced him to recall what Natalie had said back in the bar. I don’t think I’m going to get the investment and . . . instead of business, it just feels like another man using money to make me dance, you know?
He’d come to New York to lay his faults at her feet, but he couldn’t bring himself to tell her he’d kept a two-hundred-thousand-dollar investment a secret. She was already most likely leaving him, did he really have to make her hate him, too? Put him in a category with her father, the investor, and the ex-fiancé? His heart wouldn’t withstand the blow.
What was going on in her head right now? A groove had formed between her eyebrows and she appeared to be trapped between a rock and a hard place. Was this it? Was she going to end things right here and now?
“August, I need you to walk me to my room—”
“Natalie . . .” His tongue thickened in his mouth and his hands felt stupid because they weren’t on her. “I can’t do that and not come inside.”
Don’t think of their wedding night.
Don’t—
Too late.
He’d think of her mouth that night in his final moments on earth.
Right now, however, he needed to make it through a few more minutes. After which he would take a cab back to his hotel and get to his room as fast as possible. Then he would pull up those pictures that he’d added to his camera roll from social media and stroke one out to Natalie in her wedding dress. If that wasn’t a sign that he’d grown obsessed with this woman, nothing was. He actually got off remembering the moment she’d vowed in public to be his wife. That couldn’t be normal.
Natalie gripped the meatiest part of his arms and shook him. “August. I know. I know you can’t walk me to my room without coming inside.” She slid her palms up, along his shoulders and higher, cradling his face. It felt so incredible, he had to stifle a moan. “You don’t have to protect yourself. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I’m coming home with you. To St. Helena. I’m staying there. With you. Because of you.”
What?
August’s lungs were suddenly empty, the lobby sounds dulling to a whisper around him.
Had someone slipped him an Ambien on the plane and he was dreaming this whole scenario, because he could have sworn Natalie just said she was coming home with him.
His entire body was one big pulse and he could barely gather his thoughts over the booming noise it made. “I don’t understand. You’re coming back to stay, even though I’ve been a jackass? Even though you have the trust fund? And the investor?”
“You’re better than all of those things,” she whispered, eyes shining.
He doubled over, bracing his hands on his knees, doubt finally giving way to joy, which spread through him like wildfire. “You better not be pranking me.”
“Take me upstairs and find out.”
They took a giant step toward each other at the same time, Natalie tucking her small, elegant hand into his larger one. Their fingers threaded together and held.
Christ, what a privilege. This was happening. It was actually happening.
The elevator ride to Natalie’s floor was a blur. He couldn’t even scramble enough brain power to kiss her, because it was all occupied with relief and shock and happiness. So much happiness. Doors opened, feet moved along a carpeted hallway, and with her room in sight, their official reunion imminent, his brain finally, blessedly came back online. Mostly.
When had he backed her up against the door? Their mouths were a breath away from touching, her tits flattened against his chest. He was burning alive with the need to give her an orgasm. Hearing her demands, feeling those fingers twist in his hair, her pussy clamping down—
“Stop thinking about it, August, and do it.” She licked into his mouth slowly, dragging his bottom lip through her teeth. “Bring me inside. Put me up against the wall.”
If a hotel guest happened by at that moment, they would have assumed Natalie was being mugged, he reached for her bag so fast. “Key, princess. Key.”
A desperate sound bubbled out of her, both of them fumbling to get the clasp open on her purse and locate the card. He slapped it up against the sensor, groaning when the light turned green, and walked her into the room, kicking the door shut behind them. As horny as August was, spurred on by her request for wall sex, he expected to be the aggressor.
He was wrong.
Natalie shoved the jacket off his shoulders and started to unknot his tie, abandoning the task halfway through to work on his belt, leaving the tie sagging around his neck. Spoiler: nothing else was sagging. A fact Natalie discovered a few seconds later when she unzipped his fly and stuck her hand inside, molding it around August’s cock.
“Oh my God,” she moaned, riding her palm up and down the length of him, making him pulse. Making him grow impossibly thicker. “I know I’m being redundant at this point, but I need you to know you . . .”
He pressed her up against the wall, dragged her mouth into a frantic kiss. I’m kissing my woman. Thank God. “What?” he said, breaking for air. “You need me to know what?”
Her eyes were glassy, dazed. Needy. “You have the best dick,” she whispered. “I mean, I-I was thinking about it on the plane. During a business dinner. If you mass produced a mold of this thing, a lot of people would be less angry.”
“Nah, but it’s just yours, Natalie,” he rumbled, hiking up the hemline of her dress with rough hands, so turned on now he was almost in pain. If she kept talking about how much she loved his cock, he was going to nut right there in her hand. “You don’t really want to share it with anyone else,” he said in between kisses, his hips pumping, pushing his length in and out of her perfectly tight fist. “Do you, babe?”
He tugged her panties down, over her knees, letting them fall to her ankles.
“No,” she gasped, trembling. “Never.”
She looked vulnerable after the admission, so he made his own, something inside him demanding he match her step for step. Emotionally, physically. At all times. “I was preparing myself to live off memories of you for the rest of my life. It was going to kill me.” He knelt down in front of her, drawing her right knee up and settling the arch of her foot on his shoulder. “Can’t believe I get to live off you, instead. Can’t believe you’re letting me live.”
The tenderness in her eyes undid him to the point of dizziness. “There’s no letting here. You’re the best decision I’ve ever made.”
A gruff sound left August, his desperation to be joined with this woman growing to the point of pain. He wanted to lock himself to her emotionally, physically. Any manner available. She was his wife and she’d soaked herself in anticipation of his mouth, his cock. The sense of responsibility to deliver, to give her pleasure and heal both of their wounds, had August surging forward and kissing her mound. Traveling lower. Pushing apart her flesh gently with his tongue and finding that bud, greeting it carefully, then with more vigor as her moans increased in volume and her fingers ripped at the strands of his hair. “August.”
“I know,” he growled into the next lick. “I know you love that.”
He trailed the fingertips of his right hand up her left inner thigh, leaving a trail of goose bumps behind. While she was struggling to breathe, he traced the seam of her pussy with his middle finger, then tucked it deep, all while flicking his tongue against her clit. And she just sort of melted back against the wall, her flesh clamping around his knuckle, begging for a second finger. So he gave it to her in one possessive shove, then kept his digits pumping in and out of her while he stood, taking her mouth from above in a starved kiss.
“Against the wall, yeah?” he panted. “Been thinking about that?”
“Yes. Because you’re so strong,” she blurted, immediately shaking her head. “I don’t know why I keep saying these things out loud.”
“Keep doing it.” He lifted her up and pinned her to the wall, pressing their foreheads together and looking her in the eye. “Never hide from me.”
“I won’t,” she breathed, lifting her knees and settling them on his hips. “I . . . can’t.”
Victory and elation and a million other emotions rocked August.
My wife. My wife.
He punched his hips upward and sank deep, groaning into the wall beside her head while she whimpered through her first orgasm. “Left you primed for that one, didn’t I? You love the way I tongue fuck it.”
“Yes.” She continued to gasp and squirm between him and the wall, her thighs shaking around his hips, those golden eyes latched onto his. “More. More of you.”
“As much as you need.” He hooked his arms beneath her knees and started to drive hard. Fast. “As much as I need, too. Going to have you upside down and backward tonight, then carry you all the way back to California where you belong. In our home. With your man.”
“Yes.” She hiccupped, her thighs pressing in tight around his ribs, crying out when he yanked them open wider and increased the pace of his thrusts, boosting her up the wall with each one, her tits bouncing in the neckline of her dress. “Oh my God, it’s so good.”
“Mine is good?” He bit down on the side of her neck. “Crossed the motherfucking country for this tight wife pussy.” The way she clenched at that admission, growing wetter, hotter, around his driving flesh, burned away the last of his leftover self-preservation. There was only her. She was all he needed to survive and the truth of that, his truth, came pouring out. “Fuck it, I’m obsessed with you. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t. Give me the orgasm. Give it to me, princess. Yours. Come on. I fucking need it.”
Natalie speared her fingers into his hair and brought him in for a wild, almost animalistic kiss, eager little sounds coming from her throat. She was close, so close—and then her trembles turned to an earthquake, her lips releasing his to cry out, her body still getting pummeled up against the wall. His grunts turned to growls, his hips slapping upward between her thighs, eagerly experiencing her orgasm along with her. The throb and clench of his wife.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck.” August’s climax was like reaching land after parachuting at night into the ocean. For a while there, he thought he’d die, and then came the relief. Relief so utterly thorough, his legs almost gave out halfway through, but his body wouldn’t allow him to stop. He drilled her ass to the wall and held, shaking so hard his teeth chattered, muscles screaming from the strain. “Natalie. Christ. Oh Christ . . . I love you. I love you.”
His chest nearly caved in after saying the words, but he couldn’t hold them back, because they belonged to her. He belonged to her, and she should know it. Maybe she wasn’t quite able to say it back just yet. And that was okay. He should expect her to be hesitant after keeping her at a distance. He’d wait forever, for the rest of his life, for those three words from her, if necessary. For now, he should just be grateful she was coming home.
As soon as he’d finished completely, he stumbled on half numb legs to the bed, Natalie safe in his arms, and he lay down, pulling her as close as possible, kissing his way across her hairline. Her warm breath bathed his throat and he wrapped his arms tighter, drawing the duvet around their half-naked bodies as best he could when they were on top of the covers. “August, I don’t think you realize what it means to me that you came all the way here,” she said softly. “I don’t think you realize how valued and important that made me feel. Thank you.”
It took him a moment to swallow the sideways pencil in his throat. “You’re the most important person in my life, Natalie. You always will be.”
Her fingertips were busy for a moment in his chest hair, before they stilled and she exhaled slowly. “The day you rescued Teri Frasier and her kids from the flood . . . that’s when I realized I was in love with you, but when you walked in tonight, I . . . you felt like my husband. You were my real husband for the first time, and I loved you so much. I love you so much—”
“Oh my God.” August’s body moved on its own, tackling her into the pillows, covering her entire body with his. Holding her down as if to trap the words before they fluttered away. His heart was no longer beating in his chest. It was up in the clouds somewhere. There was a strong likelihood he was crushing her and wouldn’t that be ironic? Woman admits to loving man, is immediately smothered to death. But he wasn’t in control of his own body. It was fucking shaking, he was so humbled and grateful and in love. So in love he didn’t know how one body, even his big-ass one, could carry it all. “You love me, Natalie?”
“Totally. Completely. I love you, August.”
A warm balm spread across his soul. “We’re going home to run the winery together, okay? It’s ours as well as Sam’s. I’ll do better.”
She captured his face in her hands, her damp eyes looking into his equally moist ones. “I’ll do better, too. You’re not the only one who’s imperfect.”
“Agree to disagree.” He kissed her hard. “Tell me again that I’m your real husband.”
“You’re my real husband,” she breathed, a tear slipping down her cheek. “Now show me.”
When she rolled over and pressed her bare ass into his lap, he needed no further encouragement. He’d show her every single day, for as long as he lived.
